American corporate giants faced a tough time on the Capitol Hill as lawmakers grilled them as to why they were opting to do business with communist China over a democratic India.
The business captains faced a tough time when they appeared before the Congressional Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday on China's trade and industrial policies. The questioning apparently was hard in the backdrop of the exit of world's largest search engine Google from China and jailing of mining executives from Australia.
The lawmakers wanted to know whether it was the attraction of a snap of finger decision in the communist dictatorship that had lured them there or was it the massive market.
And to most of these queries, the CEOs of the companies had the stock reply that China, the world's most populous, was the largest market for US goods.
Robert Hollyman, president and CEO, Business Software Alliance, told the Congressional panel: "China is the number two largest market for personal computers to the US. It is larger than the combined market for India, Brazil and Russia in terms of sales of personal computers."
"What we need to do is be paid for that," Hollyman said.
Most of the questions were put by the Congressman Jim McDermott who told the industry leaders that they should start pulling the stuff out of China and putting it somewhere else.
Capitol Hill, McDermott said that now executives are talking about the fact that China is the past, and people are now looking at Korea and India because of their rule of law and the fact that one doesn't get thrown in jail for reasons one can't understand, as one can in China.
Ian Bremmer from the Eurasia Group said the US now needs to focus on countries like India and Indonesia rather than on China.
"The US absolutely has to be much more focused on its bilateral relations with those countries that support transparency, rule of law, international governance: countries like India, countries like Indonesia," he said.
"The simple reason that American companies do business with China is because there is a market that's growing far faster than any other market for US export products," said Dean C Garfield, president and CEO, Information technology Industry Council.
"We have made incremental progress with China; it's frustrating because it doesn't change overnight, but I think as everybody on both panels has agreed, there is no magic bullet here."
"The thing is that we have to do the hard work that it takes to go after the issues with the Chinese, but when the good faith negotiations fail then we do have to look to WTO consistent trade remedies as we have done," he said.
McDermott said one of the things that he can't understand is why the US continues to act like it is going to get a different result with China tomorrow.
"I have for a long time tried to offer India as an alternative. India operates under the rule of law. They speak English. They have intellectual property rights that they want to protect." he said.
